Windows 11
Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don’t hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.
It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that’s boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
I don’t see nixos in there!
Should hyprland be in the table or are Wayland Compositors ignored? 👀
Hannah Monata Linux and Red Star from North Korea.
Suicide linux. Nobody can run it for more than a day
Edit: i just searched “suicide linux” to see if it still exists and one of the top results was ian murdock’s wiki page, :(
elive
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
automatically includes all the proprietary stuff
Jail.
They’ve been able to figure it out so far
Doesn’t Pop!OS do that already?
Yes, as far as they’re allowed to in this country
I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices…
First I’m hearing of it. I’ma try it out
It made me lazy since they got everything to work out of the box. Lol
This. People always go “It looks like MacOS” but to me esp the icons just look like outdated Linux Mint/Cinnamon from 15 years ago. If people like ot that’s cool, it’s just not for me.
I created a distro once for class that just had diaspora installed on a live CD. It was only used for demos a looong time ago. DiasporaTest.
Yellow Dog
I actually ran this on a PPC Mac back in the day
That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.
Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.
The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it’s still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
Not obscure but I love hyprland
Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
Gentoo still exists 🙂
most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
I remember reading about it like 10 years ago along with LunarLinux (e: and sorcerer) as was curious about other source based linux distros. I thought both were dead, glad that at least sourcemage is still alive
its always a bit hard to tell with source distros.
Probably KaOS. It puts a strong focus on KDE and Qt.
As in, it doesn’t package programs using different GUI toolkits, aside from the most popular, like Firefox and GIMP. When I tried it a few years ago, you also had to enable a separate repo to get access to these.Reminds me of chakra linux. Same principals, except built on top of Arch base, and the other toolkit apps were distributed as self contained image files.
I imagine there was a time when this wasn’t obscure, but I’m guessing people today don’t remember Caldera OpenLinux. That was the first Linux distro I installed/used. A guy from church gave his copy.
Caldera eventually became SCO. But I’m pretty sure I was using Caldera OpenLinux before the whole Novell patent suit thing.
